Yuri!!! on Ice, thoughts as of episode 11

[type_wild]

YOU KNOW WHAT.
It would've been totally okay to just tell this story about this world-class figure skater with confidence issues and another world-class figure skater who wants to do something else with his life, decides to take him under his wing, and then the two fall in love while they're working towards the world championships or whatever.

It would stand the dire chance of being predictable as hell, sure. It would've been forever known as "the BL skating anime", yeah. It'd take some bona fide writing to make it stand out, but if "four men run a pastry shop" can be made into a profound little gem of slice-of-life, then I'm pretty sure it can be done with anything.

AND I'M PRETTY SURE THAT IT WOULD AT LEAST BE A STORY THAT MADE SENSE.

I'm not out to shame anyone for enjoying stuff they like - fuck, I know this would've been my favourite anime ever if Victor and Yuri had been Victoria and... probably still Yuri, but with boobs. I mean, I'd probably still be pointing out all this BS, but I'd forgive everything because they gave me non-moe lesbians.

Sadly, I don't have that patience with fujobait, and yes, this show has officially been fujobait since the moment Victor entered into that hot spring in episode 1.


I mean, WTF is even at stake in this Grand Prix final? Because right now, it feels like no matter how Yuri places, he's gonna win either way - either he wins, continues his career and Victor stays his coach forever. Or he doesn't win, presumably retires like he'd pretty much resigned himself to in episode 1, and then Victor makes a grand romantic gesture out of staying with him anyway. Ooooor Yuri narrowly misses the gold and Victor claims that his potential is too great to give up, coaching him for another season. Hell - Yuri wins, retires anyway with Victor at his side. Or mostly likely, given the end of episode 11: Yuri tells Victor to return to skating so that they can be ~rivals~, and then it doesn't matter how he places because there's going to be a second season pursuing that very storyline. The only possible way for Yuri to come out of this with a loss would be if he flops, retires and Victor returns to Russia to continue skating, and hahaha yeah, no, because that would make absolutely zero sense in a story that hasn't exactly been concerning itself with realism at any point.

Just... FUCK, but this makes me appreciate Free! on an entirely new level. Yeah, Free! is "Fujobait: The Anime", but that didn't stop it from also being really good when it just got going - everything from episode eight onwards is gold. Haru finally understanding how things stand, Rei being the responsible adult who tries to get the other idiots to do something about their problems. And Rin, just - just Rin. Rin coming closer and closer to realising why it is that he hurts and that truth is so painful, Rin taking the only action he can see that might fix it again, Rin finally knowing what he needs and then it is YANKED OUT OF HIS HANDS just before the final tournament and

The tension just keeps piling up during those few episodes, until the very end of episode 11 ruins everything and in the last episode it just gets worse and worse until it culminates in the desperate, glorious attempt to fix the things that went wrong four years ago. I mean - sure, stop and think about it and the truths revealed are kinda ridiculous and their consequences blown out of all and every proportion - but the story just doesn't LET you stop and think about it before delivering the next blow.

YoI should, by all accounts, have far more important things at stake than a high school swimming club trying to connect with an old friend, but it sure as hell doesn't feel that way. If this anime did its thing right, I should be a tittering wreck waiting to see if Yuri can do the impossible and take the gold - or better yet, honestly torn because I want Yuri to win but also Yurio will be so shattered if he doesn't and I don't want anything bad happening to him. Instead, I'm just kind of "god, whatever" about the both of them. Truth to be told, the thing I'm most interested in is if JJ can make some kind of comeback. Yeah, JJ! The guy who skates to a song written about himself about how he is the undefeatable king of skating, that is who I'm hoping good things happen to! Jesus, this bit of Hikago bleeds my heart every fucking time, and that's a game happening during an ordinary school club meeting. That has more emotions at stake than YoI does as the protagonist stands at the make-it-or-break-it point of his career. I don't know what YoI is doing wrong, and I have no particular wish to go back and try to figure it out either.

So what has Yuri!!! On Ice delivered since we last checked in at exactly that spot where Free! took off towards glory? Well we've gotta finish the Russia games before moving on to the Grand Prix, and there's the introduction of a shitton of international skaters with pastede on yay Personal Issues - many of which are, stunningly, more complex than anything we've seen from Yuri and certainly more than we've ever been given about Victor. No joke, there are characters who have been around for three episodes and are still better developed than the protagonists.

"" (Watch on YouTube)

Yurio is still in a permanent snit over Victor's life choices but takes five minutes of his life to be nice to Yuri - and he makes a friend! It goes like

TV commentator: Today's new character is Otabek, who you might've seen in the background of some previous shots of Victor competing
Otabek: Hey Yurio, I saw you in this training camp five years ago. We should be friends
Yurio: :D

(and friends, do I have my issues with this. Why this, why now, why some kid who was literally introduced this very episode, what has this got to say for the story? It doesn't bring out any new sides in Yurio, doesn't contribute to the plot, doesn't carry any kind of thematic weight, I just... WHAT ARE YOU DOING, WHY ARE YOU WASTING SCREENTIME ON THIS)

For one blissful episode Victor has to go away because of reasons that could've delivered decent angst if they'd taken the time to remind us about blink-and-you'll-miss-it details mentioned in episode 1. Yuri still cannot perform at his best unless Victor is there to watch, they reunite in a scene cut like a romcom climax and then they promise that Victor is going to be his coach forever, the story still completely unconcerned with the implication that Yuri's chances of reaching his goals as an athlete are dependent on Victor not getting a bad bout of diarrhea on the day of the finale.

Yeah, let's talk about the second problem I have with YoI: That whatever is supposed to be happening between Victor and Yuri is either happening off-screen, or it isn't happening at all.

Seriously. Suppose that they did, indeed, kiss on live TV, in front of a full audience, back in episode 7. Why does nobody of the thousands of spectators talk about it? And more grievously, why don't Victor and Yuri ever talk about it?! Sure, we're only given the barest minimum about what Victor thinks about any fucking thing happening in this story - but why doesn't Yuri, whose only explicitly romantic act thus far was directed at a woman, question the extremely amorous nature of his relationship with Victor? They hug, they share a hotel room, they exchange rings, they make a promise about ~being together always~, they might or might not have kissed each other, how the fuck does he never stop to think that hey, isn't this hella gay?! And even IF this happens in an alternate universe where no-one bats an eyelid at same-sex love, it still remains that Yuri never factors romantic love into his extreme neediness towards Victor even though their surface actions are romantic clichés. You're not the emotionally naive heroine of a Clamp manga, you don't get to pull the "why does my heart hurt when I think about him going away" so that someone else can tell you that it's ~true love~.

It's bizarre. I remember reading somewhere that if you had to have a couple kiss and exchange I love yous in order to show a romance, you're doing it wrong. And in YoI, we've had these romantic gestures exchanged between a pair of characters that, as far as I can tell, aren't in love with each other. Look at Emma, a love story set in late Victorian Britain. There's not a lot of kissing, hugging or holding of hands happening, but no reader would have a problem telling that these two are in love. Or hell: this scene from Corpse Bride. Does that look exchanged at the end leave any doubt about what's happening? Fuck it, compare it to FAKE where there's all that workplace sexual harassment non-con kissing happening between our two men and where Ryo goes on and on about how he doesn't want it, but we still get to see that lolno, he kinda likes it a lot more than he's comfortable admitting to himself. For all the issues I have with FAKE, I never questioned the chemistry between Ryo and Dee. But with Yuri and Victor? They make the gestures of a stereotypical romance, but they never talk about it, never think about it, the only time it's explicitly discussed at all is during a comedy scene where Victor goes "lolyeah they're totes engagement rings, he's gotta get gold to marry me~" and Yuri is all "huh? huh???? what" because we've already seen, during a completely serious moment, him proclaiming that they're good luck-charms for the competition tomorrow. Completely oblivious, apparently, to what it usually means when you give someone a ring.

The only time we were shown a key moment between Victor and Yuri was the crying in episode seven. They just act out these ~very romantic~ things, but except for episode seven, we never get to see the MOTIVATION behind these actions, we don't get to see WHY they do the things they do. Except for the crying bit, there is never a moment of epiphany about how the feel about each other, never any grand realisations about jesus christ, I care about this guy in a way different way than I thought I did. It is shit writing regardless of whether the feelings are romantic or not, and so it just sinks the entire focus of the show.

To make it even more baffling, a lot of parallells have been drawn to another couple struggling to function without another in order to take their sport to the next level. And that couple is a pair of siblings who clearly don't have the Ikuhara kind of sibling relationship, and who at least try to acknowledge that they'll need to be apart in order to truly perform. We're clearly meant to be comparing them to Yuri's crippling inability to channel his own abilities unless he can aim them at Victor, but why, FOR FUCK'S SAKE, aren't they a romantic couple? In any other story, the obvious answer is that neither are our favourite codependent hero and his enabler. It gets extra weird when you take into account that we've been shown two instances of how romantic relationships effect the performances of Yuri's rivals in ways that aren't at all comparable to his Victor thing the way Michele's sister complex is.

Which brings us to the main problem: Yuri's development as an athlete is portrayed as entirely dependant on his nonsensical relationsip with Victor. This in turn means that in order for him to finally grow into his own (or at least get back to the place he was when he qualified for competing among the creme de la creme), he needs to figure this out and to learn to move beyond it. If we were watching the story about how Yuri tries to decide whether to quit competitive skating or not, then sure, this entire WTFeven with Victor would make sense (still shitty writing, but it could make sense). But what we're watching the traditional sport-centred storyline of HEY PROTAG YOUR MISSION IS TO WIN THIS ONE BIG COMPETITION, and our hero can only channel his true potential if he knows that his idol is watching him. And THAT is a fatal flaw in an athlete, and THAT is what he needs to overcome in order to truly master his sport. Unless, that is, we really ARE watching his last huzzah before going back home to take over the family business - an option that has been less talked about than Haru going pro was in ES.

Yuri is among the characters I actually like on this show, but if YoI is a sports anime, then they've failed big time in showing how and why Yuri's athletic abilities have improved. We haven't seen him make any kind of discoveries about himself, we haven't seen him change his opinions on what he's doing, we haven't seen him have epiphanies about his visions for figure skating. The only thing we've seen is that he can only perform at the expected level if Victor is watching, but not him realising that oh, this might be a problem in the future and maybe I should do something about it. I mean, I'm 80% certain the thing he wants to "end" in episode 11 is Victor's assignment as his coach, but I'd sure appreciate it if that was because he himself has come to acknowledge that he's got to stand on his own feet to truly grow.

Oh and also Victor is still just "oh, he's there", which means that oooooh yeah they have failed spectacularly in writing him and when you fail at writing one half of a romance, you've killed it. We've reached the penultimate episode and we still don't know shit about Victor's motivation or Victor's past experiences or Victor's hopes for the future, so sorry - you failed. He's not a character, he's a bloody plot device. If this is supposed to be a romance and not an extremely girly friendship, you failed, and if Victor is supposed to be a main character, you failed at that too.

Finally - no, I have no idea what they're even doing with Yurio except for possibly trying to say something about the ~rival~ archetype. He doesn't have anything to say for what neither Yuri nor Victor are doing, his plot relevance ended with the competition back in Yuri's hometown, his story serves absolutely no purpose as a contrast to Yuri's, SO WHY THE PARALLEL NAME, WHY THE PRESENCE IN THE OP AND THE ED.

...Well, he broke a world record that Victor previously held - that was good!

Yeah, I guess that was one of the few things that made me honestly happy during these last few episodes.